Despite various measures taken by the Indian government, hackers managed to breach as many as 78 Indian websites in the first half of 2013. In 2012, a total of 371 government sites were attacked.

As many as 78 government websites fell prey to hackers in the first half of this year (til June), reveals Minister of State for Communications & IT Milind Deora in the Parliament. According to the minister, so far there have been 6,035 incidents related to spam, malware infection and system break-in this year.

"As per the information reported to and tracked by Indian Computer Response Team (CERT-In), a total number of 308, 371 and 78 government websites were hacked during the years 2011, 2012 and 2013 (up to June) respectively," Deora revealed in a written reply to the Lok Sabha.

As many 13,301 incidents were reported in 2011 while 2012 saw 22,060 such incidents.

"It has been observed that attackers are compromising computer systems located in different parts of the world and use masquerading techniques and hidden servers to hide the identity of actual system from which the attacks are being launched. It is difficult to attribute the origin of cyber attacks," he added.

"All new government websites and applications are to be audited with respect to cyber security prior to their hosting," Deora said. It has been made compulsory to host all the government websites on infrastructure of NIC, ERNET or any other secure infrastructure service provider in the country.

India's Intelligence Bureau has reportedly issued an warning about the efforts being made by Pakistan’s ISI to target the Indian strategic organisations by spoofing telephone calls and using malware to snoop into critical websites and systems.